


Never Give Up and Never Surrender

by Siderea



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Season/Series 07, always-a-girl!Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-05
Updated: 2012-09-05
Packaged: 2017-11-13 15:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/504816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siderea/pseuds/Siderea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deanna Winchester isn't known for letting go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Give Up and Never Surrender

**Author's Note:**

> So this wouldn't get out of my head, about how Dean reallyd oes care about people. And then I realized, hey wait: wouldn't he show that more if he were a girl? And honestly this just happened.  
> And okay yeah I like girl!Dean.  
> The first half is a lot of introspection with some sort-of action in the second half, although that mostly focuses around the last five or so episodes of Season 7. Just as a heads-up.

Everyone always said that Deanna Winchester didn’t know how to let go of those she cared about. Normal people, other hunters, monsters: they all took one look at her devotion for her brother and father and everything she had done for them, and then they all said that they knew that she would do anything for them. 

For her part, Deanna had always agreed. She knew she would do anything for her father, for Sam, and for Bobby. She was just wired that way, for whatever reason. 

The list had changed over the years as people came and went in her life. She fell in love with Lisa, loved Cassie enough to share the family secret, fought side by side with Ellen and Jo, met and got to know Ben--and then an angel of the Lord gripped her tight and raised her from perdition. She had loved all of them in her own way, doing everything she could to take care of them. 

And now it was all falling apart. 

Her father was dead. Ellen and Jo died on what turned out to be a fool’s quest. Cassie was who knows where, possibly dead after the Apocalypse-that-wasn’t. Lisa and Ben didn’t remember her. Cass was in an asylum. Bobby was haunting her through his flask. Sam had barely recovered from everything he’d been through. The leviathans might win. 

Sometimes, Deanna wondered why she bothered. Everyone she loved died. Some of them came back, but it was never the same. She was losing herself by inches, and if she didn’t drink herself to death before she was forty, then she would’ve been eaten by the leviathans or been killed by some other monster. 

But Deanna hadn’t been wired to just lie down and give up. There was a reason she’d remembered why she shouldn’t just say ‘yes’ to Michael. There was a reason an alternate version of her had led a suicide charge instead of watching the world be overrun. There was a reason Deanna was still alive when other, better people weren’t. No matter what she said, Deanna would fight and struggle to survive because that was part of who she was. 

She didn’t have the serenity to accept things she couldn’t change, but she did have an arsenal to change the things she couldn’t accept. If need be, she’d go out in a blaze; well, even if need didn’t enter into it she’d be happy to go down fighting. That was better than any other alternative.

Surrender was a foreign word, and Deanna intended to keep it that way.

XXXX

Seeing Cass again was hard. He had given up something that had once been so vital to him, and now he was different. Deanna hated to say it, but he wasn’t Cass any more, probably never would be again. Her friend had been a soldier; that hadn’t been the only noteworthy thing about him, but it had been a defining fact. It had been something that had drawn them together. Now that connection was gone with Cass’s descent into complete pacifism.

And the crack about being happy to bleed for Sam and her, that hurt. The smile he gave her when he filled up the vile cut even deeper.

Cass had changed too much, refused to do anything more than help them identify Dick, and Deanna shouldn’t blame him for that, should understand that he was burned out after everything that had happened—but she had made shit decisions and managed to pull it back together. It might have taken her a while, but she’d managed.

Seeing him plunge the weapon into Dick feels like victory even as it feels like the blast destroys her completely.

The first thing Deanna does in Purgatory is drag Cass in and kiss him soundly. She’s too relieved that he came back to himself to be embarrassed by the honest emotion she pours into the action.


End file.
